Toontrack, makers of Superior Drummer and the EZ range of instruments, have today announced Superior Drummer 3, described by Toontrack as 'the complete drum production studio.' The Pro Tools Expert team has been working with Toontrack for some time preparing for this release. James Ivey attended a preview some time ago at Galaxy Studios in Belgium and several of the team have had copies for several weeks.
This release features at least 14 new features. In the coming weeks, we will be going deep into Superior Drummer 3, for those who want an overview here is everything you need to know about Toontrack Superior Drummer 3.
Superior Drummer 3 New Feature At A Glance
In this video, we get a very close look at the new Superior Drummer 3! Hint: It’s absolutely incredible! This is my first time on camera for a tutorial. Go leave me a thumbs-up and a nice comment ? This is a 3 part video series in which I take you through each of the 4 main panels in Superior.
Exclusive Pro Tools Expert First Look Video Of Superior Drummer 3
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Pro Tools Expert was given early access to Superior Drummer 3.0. Watch our first look exclusive video to see a selection of new features in Superior Drummer 3.0 such as UI Resizing, New Mixer with Built-in Effects, Marcos and drum hit replacement in Tracker.
New Superior Drummer 3 Kits
Recorded at Galaxy Studios, described as probably the world’s quietest and ideal location for sampling, the core sound library boasts in excess of 230 GB of raw sound material captured in immersive 11:1 audio by award-winning engineer George Massenburg.
Who Is George Massenburg?
George Massenburg’s contribution to the world of audio technology is hard to emphasize in words. Aside from having produced, mixed or engineered in excess of four hundred records, received almost any industry award thinkable, been inducted into the TECnology Hall of Fame and received an honorary Doctorate of Music at the esteemed Berklee College, he is the inventor of an industry staple: the parametric equalizer. His attention to detail, accuracy, and quality is second to none.
Superior Drummer 3 - New Mixer And Effects
The new mixer includes 35 insert effects which offer low CPU usage, Toontrack claims this turns each channel strip into a virtual sound processing powerhouse.
The mixer also offers the options to route tracks to buss channels for group effects processing.
The mixer at a glance;
The New Tracker
The quickest way to describe the new Tracker in Superior Drummer 3 is drum replacement on steroids, a fully featured multitrack audio to MIDI converter. This can then trigger the audio samples contained in Superior Drummer 3
Toontrack says this; 'The Tracker introduces the arguably most efficient and accurate audio to MIDI conversion software on the market. Built on a highly advanced instrument recognition neural network, the Tracker detects hits with an unequaled accuracy and speed. With the seamless integration with Superior Drummer 3, replacing or augmenting drums has never been more powerful than now.
Having used it for several weeks it really is very clever, offering amazing automatic tricks lick identifying the audio and matching it, so in most cases it really is as simple as dragging in the audio and Tracker knows what kit parts are which and then maps to that sound. It then offers a deep level of tweaking to deal with any bleed or mis-triggers.
Superior Drummer 3 Grooves
Taking a lot of the ideas from EZ Drummer 2, the Grooves panel in Superior Drummer 3 offers features for finding, customising and working with MIDI. From quickly getting a custom beat going to diving deep into fine-tuning timing and adjusting velocity detail.
Price And Availability Of Superior Drummer 3
All versions come with the exact same software and sound library. The only two things that set the versions apart are pricing and the unique serial number.
REGULAR VERSION
For all new customers that do not own Superior Drummer 2 or EZdrummer 2. $399 | €329 | 2 799 SEK https://filmsrenew692.weebly.com/blog/russian-movie-download-sites.
UPGRADE
For owners of any version of Superior Drummer 2. $199 | €169 | 1 399 SEK
CROSSGRADE
For owners of any version of EZdrummer 2. $299 | €249 | 2 299 SEK
Superior Drummer 3 is released worldwide on September 12, 2017. Upon release, the previous version of Superior Drummer will be discontinued and no longer sold online. It may however remain in some retail outlets as long as stocks last.
DOWNLOAD CONFIGURATION & DISTRIBUTION.
The Superior Drummer 3 software will be delivered as a download, available at the Toontrack website and in the Toontrack Product Manager directly upon purchase or registration, regardless of whether the product is obtained from Toontrack’s web shop or from a third party retailer. The full Superior Drummer 3 core sound library content can be downloaded in convenient parts through the Toontrack Product Manager. At an additional cost, there is also an option of getting the full sound library pre-installed on an SSD hard drive and having it shipped directly to you.
Visit the Toontrack website for more information about Superior Drummer 3 and also our friends at Time+Space for Superior Drummer 3 upgrade and crossgrade information.
Not all major software updates are created equal. Some merely burnish the graphics and throw in a few new features. But that’s not the case with Superior Drummer 3, one of the most substantial updates I’ve ever seen. From the sounds to the grooves to the outstanding audio-to-MIDI feature and GUI, this upgrade is about as major as you get.
Superior Drummer 3 (SD3) can be used either as a plug-in or a standalone app, and its features are the same in either.
CHANGE IS GOOD
https://filmsrenew692.weebly.com/blog/160by2-free-sms. Toontrack totally redesigned the GUI, giving it a more modern look, including 3D graphics and a new window structure that includes a Song Track for assembling full-length drum parts, a la Toontrack’s EZ Drummer. Several key windows are detachable, and the full GUI is scalable, as are any detached windows, making customization for your monitor easy.
More importantly, the sound library has been significantly expanded, providing seven kits by six different brands: Ayotte, Gretsch, Ludwig, Pearl, Premier, and Yamaha. The drums are played with sticks, brushes, rods, and felt mallets, and you can load snare samples with the snares on or off. George Massenburg recorded and produced the recordings and, as you’d expect, they sound excellent and totally realistic.
A fairly sizable collection of presets—including some from Massenburg, himself—offer varying levels of ambience, compression and effects. All of those aspects are adjustable in the Mixer, which offers nine ambience mic channels (six stereo pairs and one mono channel), giving you a wide variety of room sounds for every drum. SD3 can also use those ambience channels to create a 11.1 surround mix.
Also notable is the drum-tuning algorithm. Rather than just pitch-shifting a drum, SD3 closely imitates the changes that happen to a drum when you tune the head. The results are impressively realistic. Moreover, the cymbal-tuning algorithm lets you realistically change the “size” of any of the cymbal samples.
And this is the first version of Superior Drummer to include electronic sounds; 350 snares and kicks sampled from a variety of sources, including TR-808 and -909 drum machines, and Steiner Synthacon and Buchla synths, among others. The sounds are quite good, and you can mix and match them with the acoustic sounds in a kit. Surprisingly, there are no electronic tom or cymbal samples. Among the electronic-kit presets are those created by well-known names such as Richard Devine.
The percussion offerings have also been expanded and include shakers, tambourines, cowbell, finger snaps, hand claps, and electronic claps.
GROOVE GURU
One of the anomalies of SD2 was that its MIDI drum Grooves section was not as robust as Toontrack’s less expensive EZ Drummer 2. SD3 changes that by incorporating the best of EZ Drummer’s Groove features, and more.
Tap 2 Find lets you tap in a rhythm to search the library for similar beats, and the Groove window allows you to filter your searches by categories. The Song Creator builds a series of song-length arrangements based on any single Groove.
The overall Groove collection covers a variety of styles, and additional Groove sets are available in the Toontrack online store, which you can audition from within SD3.
FOR A SONG
Grooves can be loaded into the Song Track one at a time, or strung together into a complete song from the Song Creator. The Tabs feature, which is not in EZ Drummer 2, allows you to have multiple songs (or individual Grooves) loaded at once. Whichever Tab is active will play, and it’s easy to switch between them.
You can sync your track to the host or play it independently: SD3 has its own transport controls. The Song Track offers cut, copy and paste editing, and you can drag loops around, and even color code them by song part.
The new Grid Editor is like a sequence editor where you graphically edit selected Grooves, quantize the hits, and graphically edit velocities.
Superior Drummer 3 Tutorial
When you’re done, you can export the song as a MIDI file, drag it from the Song Track directly into your DAW, or use the Bounce feature to create an audio file.
MIX MASTER
Superior Drummer 3 Free
The Mixer provides all the tools you need to mix the drums from within SD3— individual channels for each drum mic (or mic pair, in the case of room mics), along with buses, inserts and a master bus. As with previous versions, SD3 gives you control over the amount of drum bleed in each channel.
The Mixer includes 35 new effects (up from five in SD2), split into six categories—EQ, Dynamics, Distortion, Reverb, Delay and Modulation. The EQ is excellent, offering multiple parametric bands and a spectrum analyzer. The Tape Simulator is great for warming up the drum sounds (I loved it on the master bus). Models of classic hardware such as the UREI 1176 and Fairchild 670 are provided, as are stompbox models. Modulation effects such as Tremolo, Phaser, and Vibrato are particularly handy for the electronic sounds.
TRACKER STAR
One of the most impressive additions in SD3 is called Tracker (see Figure 1). It’s essentially a fully featured drum replacer. Use it to convert multitrack drum recordings into MIDI so that you can replace them with SD3 sounds. It was created using machine-learning technology and is smart enough to recognize the various parts of a drum kit, even on a track with a lot of bleed. And using the hi-hat’s multiple articulation setting, it can recognize the difference between open and closed hi-hats.
Once Tracker analyzes the audio, it categorizes it as either snare, kick, tom, cymbal (crash), ride or hi-hat. If it gets it wrong—which didn’t happen in my testing—you can manually switch it. You can audition the converted MIDI along with the original audio to hear how they line up, and there are a number of tools for tweaking the conversion if needed. For example, you can set the threshold of the algorithm that recognizes the different instruments and adjust the velocity above which the algorithm will look for notes.
I used Tracker to replace the snare and kick drum on several multitrack drum parts and it worked without any adjustments, capturing the nuances of the sticking on the snare track (and avoiding the dreaded machine-gun effect). It didn’t go quite that easy when I converted a hi-hat track. I had to do some post-conversion adjustments because SD3 recognized some of the closed-hat hits as open.
When you’re finished tweaking Tracker’s results, you can export your newly minted MIDI tracks together in one combined MIDI track, or split each track out individually. You can move your new tracks into the Song Track—where you can make additional adjustments with the Grid Editor and the other tools. Alternatively, you can drag and drop them into your DAW, or even bounce them back out as audio using SD3’s sounds.
Another cool new feature lets you import external audio files to replace, or stack on top of the samples for the various drums and cymbals. This opens up a lot of creative possibilities.
If you want to get really tweaky, Toontrack also added a Macro function that lets you gang multiple parameters on a single control knob. You can create up to 100 of these Macro controls.
MANUAL LABORIOUS
Probably my least favorite aspect of SD3 is its manual, which is accessed from inside the interface, but opens as a webpage on the Toontrack site (you must sign into your account to access it). The manual’s internal search function is tedious and inefficient. Search results are comprised of every instance where the search term was found. There’s no weighting for relevance, so you often end up having to scroll through a bunch of text to find the information you want.
Usually, I export online manuals as PDFs, to take advantage of the superior searching capabilities of that format, and you can now download the SD3’s manual directly from toontrack.com.
SD3 FOR YOU AND ME
Toontrack Superior Drummer 2.0 Manual
Overall, I was highly impressed with Superior Drummer 3. The sounds are great, the features are powerful, and the new GUI is much more intuitive and functional than the previous version. It is on the high end price-wise, when compared to its competitors, but as an all-around MIDI drum-production environment, it’s hard to beat. SD3 lives up to its name—it is superior.
Mike Levine is a composer, producer, and multi-instrumentalist from the New York area.
STRENGTHS
Sounds produced by George Massenburg. Ambience channels. Electronic instruments. Brush, rod, and mallet hits. Percussion added. Drum replacement. Improved Groove features. 35 mixer effects. Macros.
Toontrack
LIMITATIONS
Superior Drummer 3 Review
No electronic tom or cymbals. Tedious search function in the manual.
Superior Drummer Free Trial
$399 (Upgrade and crossgrade pricing available.)
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